Figure 1 shows the Windows Task Manager report that the browser client loaded into Edge Chromium takes up 775 MB while the processes which compose the Teams desktop client need 887 MB. I tested this assertion and found that it’s true. Microsoft’s article says that because the desktop and browser clients share the Chromium memory management model, much the same memory usage profile is seen. It’s therefore an expected condition to see the Teams processes occupy a lot of memory, even when apparently idle. As demand grows from other applications, Teams releases memory. Essentially, if a workstation has free memory, Teams will take some of that memory to cache data and keep structures in memory instead of going to disk. An interesting Microsoft article explains how the Chromium memory model works for Teams. As Teams is an intensely graphical application, a lot of rendering happens, and memory is consumed. It’s used by Teams for rendering the user interface and text. Chromium Memory ManagementĬhromium is part of Electron. But any platform brings some penalty, and the upside of using Electron is that Teams gets a client that works in much the same way on Windows, Mac, Linux, and browsers. It’s true that the decision to use Electron as the development platform incurs some cost. Some hold that this is the foundation of Teams demanding so much memory because of the need to load so many libraries. Like many assertions, there’s a mixture of truth and fiction mixed in here. Teams often gets tagged as a performance hog, with people pointing to the huge amount of memory the desktop client grabs on Windows and the constant ticking over of CPU cycles when the client seems to be inactive.

Microsoft teams mac cpu usage